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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
The “Victimhood Sweepstakes” carnival is sweeping the nation, soon to come to a city near you.
In Philadelphia, the sweepstakes carnival arrived last year when the formation of the Reparations Task Force was announced in November 2023. City Council approved the resolution on June 22, 2023. Councilmember Kendra Brooks (At-Large), a member of the Working Families [socialist] party was happy with the vote, declaring, “Every day we see the ongoing imprint of slavery and racist policies on the people of Philadelphia.”
Brooks’ statement is a mouthful, since “racist policies” in a city that, according to 2021 census, has a black population at about 40% with whites registering at 33.8% is tantamount to a myth. Philadelphia City Council is nearly all black; the mayor is black; blacks if anything have a smoother escalator ride to “success” in Philadelphia than at any time in history.
The black population also continues to grow exponentially. A mere 16 years ago my Old Richmond neighborhood was predominately white. Local businesses were all staffed by whites and blacks rarely had a presence here. Today, those stats have been turned around. Whites are increasingly becoming the minority. Ride the Market-Frankford El to the 69th Street Transportation Center and you’ll see that 90% of the riders are black.
Philadelphia is a black city. To call the city racist is tantamount to calling it self-hating and masochistic.
With that said, because Council member Brooks said what she said, I felt a need to examine my conscience and search for overt racism in the City of Brotherly Love. I must report, however, that any evidence of racism in the city’s institutions or streets was hard to find despite my donning a Sherlock Holmes cap and magnifying glass.
Yes, even in that imaginary get-up, I found nothing. Whites in Philadelphia, if anything, bend over backwards to do and say things to their fellow black residents to prove that they haven’t a racist bone in their body. I see this sort of thing on a daily basis.
A black homeless guy asks for money and is accorded a softer treatment from whites—he gets the cash—than a homeless white Irishman would get—because, you know, the latter is supposed “to know better and get a job.”
Sexism- and misogyny-obsessed twenty-something white girls in revealing skin tight shorts and minimalist tops “tolerate” or smile back when a black man whistles at them or makes a sexually suggestive comment. Those smiles evaporate quickly when a white construction worker adopts this sort of behavior. To correct a black man in public is a racist act.
Not so long ago, I heard a story about how a white progressive millennial neighborhood woman discovered that a black homeless man had broken into her car and was attempting to steal it, but rather than call the police, she asked the man if he was hungry and when he said he was, she brought him out some food and fed him.
One thing is perfectly clear: there is no inherent or “systematic” racism in Philadelphia, at least the way people like Kendra Brooks are claiming.
But it’s not only Kendra Brooks. Council-member Jamie Gauthier (3rd District), announced in 2023 that, “Until we look into our past with the determination to uncover the entire truth—no matter how ugly or scary that truth may be – our nation’s original sin will continue to toxify the present and future. This work is for our people, by our people.”
Gauthier then urged black Philadelphians to apply to join the Reparations Task Force “as we examine our past and shape the future.”
Shape-shifting the “future” will not be settled by Reparations. The “original sin of slavery,” as race-card progressives like to say, will always demand further correctives. If reparations ever become the law of the land, after that we will see additional demands put on municipal and state governments to eradicate the nation’s “original sin.” The progressive agenda is a living, breathing entity that requires constant feeding—a bottomless Venus Fly Trap– because its work is never done.
As it is, Philadelphia joins California, New Jersey, Amherst, MA, Wilmington, Chicago and Detroit in the reparations sweepstakes.
In 2023, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors appointed a panel to consider whether reparations should be paid to that city’s black residents (California never had slavery, by the way.) The panel decided that every eligible black resident of the city would receive 5 million dollars each and get an additional $97,000 a year for life with the added bonus of being able to buy any house in the city for one dollar.
The Hoover Institute at Stanford University reported that if San Francisco adopted the panel’s recommendation, the cost for individual non-black families in the city would be $600.000 each.
Brendan O’Neill, in writing about reparations in The Spectator, noted what Frederick Douglas said when asked what should be done with black people post-emancipation. Douglas replied: “Do nothing with us. If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”
And yet support for reparations for the descendants of slaves continues to infect left progressive organizations like the ACLU despite widespread disapproval from the American public.
According to a 2021 poll from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a 2022 Policy Pew Research Center poll, two thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, while two-thirds of Californians indicated that they were in favor of some form of reparation.
Most Americans, however, take a dim view of cash reparations, something that Michael Regan, the son of the former president, called a “cash and grab scam” in an article for Newsmax, and that columnist George F. Will called a “plague of solemn silliness.”
Unlike gender, poll numbers really are fluid, which is why woke cities like Philadelphia are working overtime to normalize the idea of reparations so that in time citizens will come to accept reparations as “just” and “inevitable.” Or, of course, the public may just grow sick and tired of the whole argument and throw in the towel just to be done with it.
May 2024 saw the reintroduction of a new and improved Philadelphia Reparations Task Force with a staff that includes people like Rashaun Williams, a self described “humanitarian rights justice and law convener,” and Breanna Moore, a Ph.D candidate at the (forever woke) University of Pennsylvania. The Reparations Task Force staff list, in fact, reads like a faculty listing at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ironically, the Philadelphia news media reported that the reparations task force hosted a public hearing session in City Hall so that the public could share their perspective on the issue. As a journalist who gets regular press emails from City Hall, I can tell you that at no time did I receive notice that an open forum on reparations was taking place.
Perhaps it helps not to advertise (too much) an open public forum on the issue of reparations because, you know, you might get…opposition. The lack of oppositional voices in City Hall chambers would certainly go a long way in helping to get a majority approval in City Council, proof yet again that there’s not a racist bone anywhere in the city’s “municipal institutions,’ and that Kendra Brooks’ and Gauthier’s claim that William Penn’s city is steeped in racism is nothing but stale woke sauerkraut.
As O’Neill wrote in The Spectator:
“The idea that modern-day blacks are shaped and haunted by the crimes of yesteryear is deeply demeaning. Randall Robinson, in his influential tome The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, said reparations are necessary because slavery ‘debilitated a whole people psychologically, socially and economically’. Such thinking presents black people as marionettes pulled this way and that by dead events over which they have no control. Their self-esteem, their opportunities (or lack thereof) – all are apparently moulded by the terrifying force of history. This is ahistorical, apolitical and patronising.”
The reparations movement was founded by Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, a native of New Liberia, Louisiana. Audley called for reparations from 1955 until her death in 1997 at age 98. Moore believed that black people were due recompense for the denial of their 13th, 14th and 15th amendment rights during the Jim Crow years.
In the early 1960s, Moore attempted to present a petition to then President John F. Kennedy to address the idea, but Kennedy wasn’t having it. Moore, who was then living in Harlem, became a follower of black activist Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers and then befriended Malcolm X. Although born a Catholic, she left the Church when she objected to Pope Pius XII’s support of Italy during the Second Italo-Ethopian War. She later became a “bishop” in the Apostolic Orthodox Church of Judea.
In 1972, she was given the title “Queen Mother” by members of the Ashanti People in Ghana.
In one of her last public speeches, Moore said, “Reparations, reparations… keep on. Keep on. We’ve got to win!”
As far as Ghana is concerned, history is rife with examples of how many wealthy black Ghanaian families owned slaves years before the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
If the blacks do get the cash reparations, whites can recoup by going into the jewelry business……and/or the illegal drug business.
A fool and his money are soon parted…..and some are more foolish than others.
People all over the world, everybody, join hands, join, start a love train, love train.
Ain’t no stopping us now. We’re on the move
If you don’t know me by now, you will never never never know me.
Three songs from Philadelphia made a fortune FIFTY years ago.
They don’t need reparations they need to work hard, that’s all.
Plus they are still wearing feckin masks, dumb.
Isn’t everyone sick to death of this reparations bull***? The reason the black community is always in the dumper financially is due to the complete destruction of the family, thanks to Great Society welfare programs.
In 1960, the illegitimacy rates for whites and blacks was 1% and 25%, respectively. Today, it is 24% for whites, 70% for blacks and 42% for Hispanics. Still think the 1960s sexual revolution and the dismantling of Hollywood censorship were good ideas?
With no father in the home, women are usually broke. But worse, the kids go off the rails, especially boys.
If social programs destroy black families disproportionately, perhaps they are racist and need to be eliminated.
I agree that black people are due reparations. The Democrat Party should party should pay reparations to every black person for their policy of slavery and later violating their civil rights under the Democrat Jim Crow laws. Hell, the Democrats could at least pay back all the money they sucked out of black communities with their BLM psyop.
Sure, let’s reject over two thousand years of the long march towards individual liberty which has achieved its highest level in the English-speaking world. We can reject the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the English Common Law and re-adopt the Code of Hammurabi which holds that people are guilty of the sins of their Fathers. or even beyond that, with mODERN flair, for the sins of someone else’s Father. Smooth move.
An ungratefulAfrican-American community has yet to offer even minimal financial reparations for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war to end slavery. AA’s whine that the US is a racist country, ignoring the reality that it is the only nation on earth to have willingly paid an enormous price in blood and treasure to secure the freedom of an enslaved populace.
$600.000? Do you mean $600.00? $600,000.0
One thing is for sure the very idea of paying reparations to the descendants of former slaves from old South is absurd nonsense.
Just look at the facts that the Southern slaveholders are all long dead and buried. Likewise, the slaves they held are all dead and buried.
The fact is that Black people living in American in this century and in last century had never been slaves, unlike some of the grandfathers had been
It’s wrong as some to blame all White people for the sins of a few did in the past or the present.
In the old South when slavery was legal, very few Whites had enough money to buy slaves; many Whites in Old South were poor. Of course, hat only a few on that many South Whites actually had slaves by comparison, that did not make the practice of slavery in America right. Still the entire story need to be made clear to keep things in perspective.
Once during the civil war one feudal solider asked a Confederate soldier “Since you come from very poor family and doesn’t own any slaves, then why are you fighting for the Confederacy ?’ To that question the Confederate soldier replied because you’re down here.”
As for the North, it was legal and common practice of wealthy Americans who had been drafted to pay a poor White man to take in place in the Union army. As my great grandfather had done.
In the passing of time through that, war many of the soldiers on both sides of that “War between the States” had become bitter and complained that this awful violent deadly conflict was “A rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”
All the wasted time that some Black people do complaining about not getting any reparations for something they didn’t suffer but some of their grandfathers who had been slaves had suffered. Come on to far too late for their grandparents to get reparations, they were the ones who deserved some money payback. Not their grandchildren.
What all those modern complainers need to do and should do is look to many of the modern Chinese Americans who also had their grandfathers terribly mistreated and abused by given the worse and most dangerous jobs with little pay in the construction of the Pacific Railroad.
Likewise, their grandfathers had been given the very worse difficult backbreaking dangerous jobs in the mines of the Western States. In the city of San, Francisco during much of the 1800’s the Chinese hand been limited to life, or exist, in the ghettos of that city.
The point is that no one hears the Chinese alive today complaining about the awful treatment of the grandparents. .One of the. Reasons for this is that they are too busy in working to establish or have now established an entrepreneurship of a business. For just complaining about long past wrongs is a complete waste of time and effort the can be put in and investment in a business.
The Black people may look to the Chinese of America and a role model for how to get ahead in life.
The reparations scam is without merit. It is not just based on its surface rationale, It is a tool to preserve the privilege of the civil rights establishment. It is also a tool of cultural Marxism to divide and destroy America.
Irony of all ironies, that the reparations movement seems to be connected symbolically to the former Ashanti Empire. That empire paid a huge role in the transatlantic slave trade. By the way, that trade was shut down in the early 19th century by President Thomas Jefferson and also the British Crown. As Thomas Sowell wrote in Race and Culture: A World View (1994), “Slavery existed in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for thousands of years…Slavery was “peculiar” [Peculiar Institution] in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded.” Yet reparations are demanded from people living today who had nothing to do with slavery. Some are also descendants of those who helped set people free (1861-1865). That is not social justice; that is an unconstitutional and immoral scam.
Audley Moore was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, not New Liberia. New Iberia was founded by Spaniards in 1779 and named after the Spanish Iberian peninsula. Liberia is the West African country founded in 1821 by white and black American segregationists. They shipped former slaves there from America . British and American navy ships also captured African slave ships and sent those freed slaves to Liberia because buying slaves in Africa had been made illegal in 1807 by the US Congress and English Parliament. That’s right, white navies were freeing black slaves from black slavers. Let’s see a Hollywood movie about that.
When I was in Hong Kong some years back I witnessed a traditional funeral for what was probably a wealthy deceased merchants. The funeral carriage was bedecked with flowers, and fake coins and currency. Yes, bills worth billions of dollars redeemable in gold from “the Bank of Hell.”
Simple solution: make master lists of all the actual slaves liberated visible on a public website. Make it clear that the spirits of dead slaves can now materialize and claim their $1 billion of mortuary play money each . Those victims were the only ones deserving of any reparations .
The Negro in America has been taught from birth to believe he is a victim and so must act out accordingly, However it is the DemocRATS that have been the slavers and the Founders of the KKK and Jim Crow Laws and yet it was 600 thousand White men that died in the Civil War which was partly to end slavery as it was.
However if the Negro in America today screams about White people today having to pay them money and they think they are hard done too then I see ”reparations” as Welfare Payments, Section 8 Housing, Affirmative Action Programs and yet the Negro appears to be worse off today than he was in the 1950s when black neighborhoods were not like something out of the OK Corral on a nightly basis.
So is this due to the absence of a Father in the home, Gangsternigga Rap, the promotion of chains around the neck while pointing a Gun or shooting somebody from a Car as it drives by..
The Negro in America needs to learn that success is the best revenge and perhaps try emulating the Chinese in America, or the Irish or the Jews all of whom went ahead and made their communities better, cleaner, safer and their children better educated… But then Im a mature European American male so I guess I must start paying for the sins of people I never had any connection too whereas the West African Tribes should be coming up with some of that Cash as they kidnapped and Sold the Africans to the European Slave Traders who in turn learned the Trade from the muslim Arabs…Who is playing whom for fools…